Partiko - A little Review

For over a year I was using eSteem to check Steem on my phone. It's certainly a good app, but it is still kind of buggy sometimes and could use some more polishing. But it was last updated in April 2018 (at least for Android, but also the last commit on GitHub was on May 30, 2018). I have no idea why the development seems to be stagnated, if you know why there are so little updates for eSteem, please let me know in the comments.

I was more and more reading "Posted using Partiko Android/iOS" as signature of comments or posts, so two weeks ago I gave it a try to here are my impressions:

The Good

Compared to eSteem the whole user interface is much more streamlined and intuitive. Also, Partiko takes less time to start on my phone. I also appreciate the "Discover" function (although I have no idea on what the displayed posts are based, to me it seems rather random).

The notifications are solved very well, since Partiko groups them, according to what type of notification it is, allowing you to dismiss e.g. all notifications about received votes at once instead of one by one (like it was in eSteem), in general what Partiko does really well is getting a lot of minor details right, which makes the app fun and easy to use. Like automatically saving posts whenever the app isn't on top of the phone, it's not that big of a feature, but the sum of all these minor details is what determines the overall impression.

I also have to mention the gamification elements: if you do certain actions with the app (checking-in, writing a post, writing a comment or upvoting a post) gives you points. You can trade in these points for upvotes from @partiko, but only, when you post from the app. Personally I'm a sucker for those kinds of elements, and so I do most of my upvoting nowadays using Partiko.

The Bad

It is a little inconvenient to search for a tag: when using the search function, it shows you users and posts; when selecting tags from "Trending", you can only chose from the top 20 tags. It's nothing too big, but a bit annoying, especially when you want to see what new posts are there for a certain tag.

Maybe I'm just too old for it, but in my opinion typing on a phone is a pain. It's ok for shorter texts like messages or even comments, but writing any post that is slightly longer (and usually everything I don't post via @steepshot falls under this category) takes much longer than writing it with a keyboard. I admit, that this is not a problem of Partiko, but rather of me, but I still had to mention it (since it also kept me from writing posts from eSteem).

And finally: I understand that showing the signature "Posted using Partiko Android/iOS" is good for spreading the word about the app, but it would be good, if there was an option to turn this off. Especially when reading comments, I find this to be out of place. Of course, you can edit your post afterwards and remove it, but that's not really how it should be.

The Questions

After the drama about DLive leaving Steem, I tend to be a bit critical when something seems too good to be true (and yes, Partiko looks like this). Right now Partiko is very centralised, e.g. I assume that the points for claiming rewards are stored in a database controlled by Partiko. I'm not sure if the developers want to move this to an SMT in the future, but given the situation, which Steemit Inc. is right now, it will still take a while until SMTs are ready. Also, Partiko is not open source (yet) and therefore we, the users, are completly depended on the benevolence of Partiko Inc. I have to say that right now I have no reason to believe that Partiko Inc. is going to pull a similar stunt as DLive did and I believe that they are very commited to the Steem and the success of this blockchain.

Conclusion

Partiko is a wonderful app for using Steem on your phone. I can highly recommend it.

Posted using Partiko Android